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July 2018
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This is the full speech by historian Professor Emerita Bridget Brereton on June 4, 2018 at the formal book launch of The Grooming of a Chancellor, a memoir by medical researcher, Professor of Medicine, former PAHO Director and UWI Chancellor Emeritus Sir George Alleyne. The launch was held at the Campus Principal’s office at The UWI, St Augustine.BY BRIDGET BRERETON
In a column in March in the T&T Express, David Jessop lamented how few CARICOM political leaders, at least in recent times, had published autobiographies or had encouraged biographies. We at UWI have done better. Former VC Sir Allister McIntyre published his autobiography recently, and both of our two former Chancellors, Sir Shridath Ramphal and now Sir George, have done so. (Mr Bermudez should take note: writing an autobiography is a job requirement.) Sir George’s career and achievements are of course unique, but as a historian I’m trained to look for patterns in people’s lives, and in many ways his trajectory constitutes a classic Caribbean story of the twentieth century. There is the theme of mobility and migration. Sir George spent his first 18 years in his native Barbados; but then, apart from a short stint in 1960/61 working as a junior doctor at the then Barbados General Hospital, he never lived there again. (Of course, he still talks like a Bajan.) He was in the UK in 1961/62 for postgraduate training, but he spent the rest of his life in Jamaica and in the USA. He is a transnational man, like so many other eminent persons born in the region, but he has never ceased to be of and for the Caribbean. Then, consider the social class origins which produced this engaged Caribbean intellectual, teacher and international public servant. Born in 1932, he was the first child of a primary school teacher: how many of this region’s distinguished sons and daughters born in the last century had teacher parents? His father, Clinton Alleyne, never went to a secondary school, far less a tertiary institution; he began as a pupil teacher and became a certified teacher in an Anglican primary school. Young George attended his father’s school and was coached for a government scholarship by him. In another classic pattern, Clinton was a stern disciplinarian, certainly not averse to corporal punishment in the home or the school. Absent fathers, my mother who fathered me, are certainly a part of the Caribbean social narrative, but so are the reverse: very present, involved, ambitious and sometimes domineering fathers. Sir George’s mother Eileen, in another classic pattern, never worked outside the home while her husband was alive (he died aged only 45 when his first son was in Jamaica), but she sewed and baked to earn extra cash. Eric Williams’ mother did the same, and so did thousands of other ‘respectable’ mothers of large families whose husbands had white-collar but ill-paid jobs. Like CLR James’ mother, Eileen read a lot and visited the public library in Bridgetown weekly. The young George read everything he could get his hands on and the Carnegie Public Library became a ‘second home’ to him. Sir George grew up, all this is to say, in a classic upwardly mobile, lower-middle-class, nuclear Bajan family. There were seven siblings who all reached adulthood, no mean achievement, as he notes, in a Barbados which “had some of the worse social conditions in the Caribbean”, including a very high infant mortality rate in the 1930s and 1940s. The family was a pillar of the local Anglican church and ambitious for the education of the children. Another familiar pattern: Sir George was the classic “scholarship boy”. On his second attempt, and helped by his father’s coaching, he won a coveted scholarship to Harrison College, the “first grade” school, in 1944. Like QRC here, or Queen’s College in Georgetown, Harrison was an English grammar school, with many British staff members, though by the 1940s they were increasingly being replaced by Barbadians. The description of his time here, though quite brief, reminds us of the famous accounts of QRC earlier in the last century by Williams and James. Young George did the classics, including Greek, confirming the assertion by our own Professor Courtney Bartholomew that Latin and Greek are the best foundation for a medical career. And he became conscious, for the first time, of racial discrimination; he made no white friends at college. After a brilliant career, he won one of the four Barbados Scholarships in 1950. Incidentally, Sir George doesn’t explain the origin of his nickname “Champ”. He does describe a famous boxing match with Harrison’s rival, the Lodge School, in which he was knocked out in the opening moments of the first round, marking the end of his pugilistic career. My spies in Barbados tell me that he acquired the nickname at school as a result of this boxing disaster. Schoolboys are traditionally sarcastic, but as it turned out, the nickname “Champ” was remarkably prescient and appropriate. At this point, Sir George deviated from the classic pattern: he could have gone to a British university but chose the very new UCWI at Mona. He says that his main reason was a “nascent West Indian nationalism” and the likelihood of the Federation coming into being soon. And having discovered the extent of discrimination and prejudice in Barbados—he quotes Keith Hunte in describing it as “apartheid practiced by consenting adults”—he had no desire to spend his university years in another white-dominated country. He had heard that Jamaica was “much more open” than Barbados—class was important there but race prejudice was less oppressive. (What he doesn’t explain, however, is why he chose medicine despite not having done the sciences in school.) And so he departed for Jamaica, by air, in October 1951, a huge event for the family; neither parent had ever left Barbados. Reflecting on what brought him to Mona, Sir George stresses his upbringing in a strong nuclear family; the home encouragement to speak well and to read; the basic ethical tenets of Christianity if not so much its dogma; the discipline of school work—he didn’t do the sciences but the discipline of doing the classics easily transferred to medicine—punctuality, preparation, detail, planning. Again, a classic pattern, not of course unique to the Caribbean. Sir George’s account of his time at Mona as a medical student and intern is a valuable source for the history of UCWI in the 1950s. It was here he “became West Indian”, just as so many others did at British universities in the post-war period. It was peer group friendships which made him and his classmates West Indians, he writes, along with the federal debates on campus and in the media; nor did the end of Federation lead to any renouncing of the West Indian idea among his contemporaries. He was a predictably brilliant student, but there was time for a full undergraduate life. Most important, there was time to court a young Jamaican nurse at the University hospital—I am told this too was a classic pattern at Mona—and he and Sylvan Chen were married in 1958 after he completed his internship. Sir George pays generous tribute to her “indispensable” role in his life and career. After his brief stint at the hospital in Barbados, and his postgraduate training in London, Sir George returned to Mona in 1962, and soon joined the TMRU under John Waterlow. Here he became a medical researcher, and was, as he writes, a driven and competitive young scientist, keen to make his mark and to prove his competence as a West Indian. He participated in the ground-breaking work on renal and cardiac function in malnourished children, research which became internationally famous and helped to improve the lives of countless youngsters in developing countries. Waterlow was a great mentor, “the doyen of mentors”, responsible not only for his scientific development but for his personal growth, Sir George writes, and his model as a manager and boss. In 1972, aged 40, Sir George succeeded another important mentor, his undergraduate Professor of Medicine, Eric Cruickshank, in that prestigious post: from junior doctor to professor in just ten years. As Professor, and then Head of the Department of Medicine, he helped to build up the Mona Faculty, at a time when it was UWI’s sole full-fledged provider of medical education and oversaw the clinical teaching being carried out in Trinidad and Barbados. This was during turbulent times at Mona in the 1970s; during one spate of unrest on campus, it was rumoured that he and another medical professor were going to be attacked in order to destabilize things. None of this stopped him from his accustomed teaching and clinical duties, including visiting the University Hospital at all hours, though for several nights there were armed guards on his street and one on his verandah. The second half of the book deals with Sir George’s “international odyssey”, as he puts it, beginning when he left Mona in 1981. He felt the time had come to take on new challenges and to serve the cause of health in a wider sphere. So began his eventful career with PAHO in Washington, as (in succession) Head of the Research Coordinating Unit, Director of Health Programmes, Assistant Director, and finally Director for two terms (1995-2003). (He had to acquire Spanish in a hurry, and here the Latin helped). This section of the book (chapters 6 to 10) will probably be of most interest to many readers. He discusses the challenges of working out the relations between the CARICOM Health Desk, Caribbean governments, and PAHO, which was the inter-American arm of the WHO. Chapter 7 includes a frank account of the diplomacy, politicking and intrigue involved in the campaign that led to his election as PAHO Director, the first non-Latin, English-speaking, black person to hold the post (and with no formal training in public health). It speaks to the respect in which he was held that he was elected unanimously, the first time this had ever happened for a first term. During his first term as Director (1995-99), his priorities were to promote the implementation of equity in PAHO’s health programmes—“Health for All”—and diversity; bringing in more women was important, and Rosa Mirtes of Argentina, whom he appointed as Assistant Director, succeeded him as the first female Director in 2003. In his second term, rethinking what governments should be doing in public health was a key project, with eleven essential public health functions established and ratified by member states. He demitted office in 2003 after two successful terms, but not before presiding over PAHO’s centenary celebrations in 2002. Students of international relations would do well to study chapter 9, in which Sir George describes his spirited campaign in 1996/98 to be elected Director-General of WHO as the official CARICOM candidate. Despite what he describes as a brilliant campaign by the Barbados government, and support from all the CARICOM states, he lost to Gro Brundtland. It was, he writes, the first time he had lost any contest! Sir George demitted office in 2003, and chapter 11 is well titled “the myth of retirement”. Reading his account of his myriad projects after he left office is truly disheartening for a retiree of much more modest activity like myself. He was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean and a driving force behind PANCAP. He writes that his basic concern for human rights, and his recognition that prejudice and stigma against gay sex tended to prevent people coming forward for testing and treatment, drove his work of advocacy. (He and our own Dean Antoine co-authored a 2013 book, HIV and Human Rights: Legal and Policy Perspectives on HIV and Human Rights in the Caribbean.) He is possibly best known in the region for his tireless campaigns against the “lifestyle” or non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and their impact on human development in the region. His advocacy helped to bring about the 2007 CARICOM Summit on NCDs in Port of Spain, for which he gives credit to former PM Patrick Manning and Eddie Greene of CARICOM. He participated in the Special UN General Assembly on NCDs in 2011, and up to the present has continued to be very active in the region and globally through his many presentations on the NCD crisis. (I need hardly point out that he is himself almost frighteningly fit and trim…) The book’s last chapter details the “Return of the Pelican” as our Chancellor from 2003 to 2017 (two terms), though he had been involved in university affairs well before that. He was the first UWI graduate to serve as Chancellor, and this chapter includes some valuable reflections on the role and scope of this traditionally loosely defined post. With his trademark diplomacy and discretion, Sir George describes the difficult process surrounding the appointment of the VC to succeed Rex Nettleford in 2001 and again in 2003, and offers his (also diplomatic) assessment of the three VCs he served with, Nettleford , Nigel Harris, and Hilary Beckles. He will always be remembered for his inspiring graduation addresses, different each year for each campus, and for his insistence on shaking hands with every single graduate, which is so meaningful for them and their family. When he became Chancellor, overall enrollment was 22,577 (2002/03); by 2015/15, it was just over 49,000. Sir George has presided over at least 50 graduation ceremonies and greeted more than 75,000 new graduates, with tireless grace and dignity (famously, he could be stern when he thought audience members were making too much noise). In addition to the well-written main text, the book includes a list of major lectures and formal presentations made by Sir George between 1979 and 2016 (a formidable list indeed), and the titles of his graduation addresses between 2003 and 2016. (Two selections of his speeches have been published, in 2002 under the title A Quest for Equity, and in 2008 under the title Health and Development in Our Time.) I close by quoting the last sentences of this record of a life well and usefully lived: “I ended one of my last graduation addresses by bidding the graduates and the university farewell, and clarified that I did not intend it to suggest an irrevocable parting. I meant it in the pristine sense of “fare thee well”, and I made that wish for their sakes and mine. Farewell.” Farewell and thank you, Sir George, for this book, and above all for your service. |
It is a real honour to be asked to speak about this important book, by a man for whom I have the greatest possible respect and admiration, and I thank him for doing so.